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The Linguistic Dimension of Kant's Thought

Historical and Critical Essays

Edited by Frank Schalow and Richard Velkley

Among modern philosophers, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) has few rivals for his influence over the development of contemporary philosophy as a whole. While the issue of language has become a key fulcrum of continental philosophy since the twentieth century, Kant has been overlooked as a thinker whose breadth of insight has helped to spearhead this advance.

The Linguistic Dimension of Kant’s Thought remedies this historical gap by gathering new essays by distinguished Kant scholars. The chapters examine the many ways that Kant’s philosophy addresses the nature of language. Although language as a formal structure of thought and expression has always been part of the philosophical tradition, the “linguistic dimension” of these essays speaks to language more broadly as a practice including communication, exchange, and dialogue.

About the Author

FRANK SCHALOW is University Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Orleans.

"In brief, The Linguistic Dimension of Kant's Thought asks us to reconsider a commonplace of intellectual history, according to which the Kantian revolution, which revised the Cartesian cogito to the point where it begins to dissolve as an epistemic center, is overcome and thus completed by a corresponding "revolution in thought" that generally goes by the name of the 'linguistic turn,' which then dominates both continental and Anglo-American thought in the twentieth-century. This volume requires that we consider the possibility that the latter "turn" was already at work in the Kantian revolution, if not completely, then surely in part." —Peter D. Fenves, Professor of German, Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University